‘The Workhouse’ – Tolkien’s Purgatory

[Child of the 7th Age]

Esty, Davem,

These are interesting ideas. I do have a question regarding this:

Tolkien wrote this story during a creative crisis, being unable to finish The Lord of the Rings, Carpenter suggests in his biography. Did he think he would have to leave it uncompleted? Or did he realize that his perfectionism, like Niggle’s, stood in the way of completion?

When we consider the "real life" events that led Tolkien to write Niggle, another question comes to mind. I wonder if he was thinking solely about the Lord of the Rings in terms of perfectionism and not finishing his work, or of the Legendarium as a whole. I know that sometimes when I am in a funk, I begin thinking about the immediate problem at hand (e.g., not finishing the particular project I am working on ---in JRRT's case LotR) and, before long, that problem becomes larger and larger in my head, until I am thinking about a much grander set of similar problems and my basic character "limitation" that has put me in this mess.

Is it possible that the author was ruminating on the entire Lgendarium in its unfinished state -- what he still regarded as the "true masterpiece" of his life -- or were his thoughts confined to the immediate book at hand? I could be reading events backwards into this: specifically, the fact that Tolkien would never finish the Silm, something he onviously could not have known. If he was only thinking of LotR, wasn't that a new way of viewing that work? Did he now realize on some level that it would be LotR which would be the central masteripiece he would leave rather than the older tales of the Legendarium?

Sorry about these vagaries, but does anyone have thoughts on this....